Maha el Daya has painted vibrant land and seascapes that chronicle an ever-changing city.
Photograph: Courtesy of Maha Al Daya

A handsome poster of James Barry’s 18th-century painting King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia advertised a video performance by school students in the Nuseirat refugee camp, an overcrowded and impoverished sprawl in the middle of the Gaza Strip.

True, Cordelia’s (very modest) decolletage had been Photoshopped to leave an orange blur, but this was the only concession to the socially conservative sensibilities of Hamas, at whose education ministry’s cultural centre the show was taking place.

It was an imaginatively produced series of drawn and photographic tableaux with a voiceover in faultless English by the high-school pupils and some arresting visual effects. The aged king’s palace was Blenheim, while Regan’s home was Buckingham Palace, complete with ceremonial troop of Grenadier Guards standing in for her visiting father’s unwelcome entourage. There were no Arabic subtitles. But as the show was condensed into 31 minutes – with every plot development intact – none of the parents who had loyally turned out for the evening seemed to mind.

It might seem incongruous to find an event commemorating the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death in an isolated enclave corralled by electronically monitored fences, ruled by an armed and proscribed Islamic faction, and succinctly dismissed by Condoleezza Rice as a “terrorist wasteland”. But it was part of a long history of cultural life and heritage, easily overlooked amid a decade-long economic siege and three devastating wars.

In his introduction to theBook of Gaza, a collection of short stories, novelist Atef Abu Saif writes that Gaza has been a “centre of civilisation” since Canaanite times. He points out that Imam al-Shafi’i, the great eighth-century Islamic jurist, was also a poet, and that in the latter part of the 20th century Gaza writers turned increasingly to novellas and short stories to get around Israeli printing and publishing restrictions. Short stories are now a staple of the Strip’s literature.

The artist Maha al-Daya and her husband Ayman Eissa, also a painter, lived, when I first met them in 2009, in a prematurely ageing apartment block overlooking a desolate stretch of wasteland on the edge of Jabalya. The climb up the grimy stairs to their fourth-floor apartment wound around a lift shaft with no lift. It was a shock to find elegant decor and furnishings inside. The walls were covered with their paintings: a haunting portrait of a naked child by Ayman; Maha’s own vibrant land and seascapes that chronicle an ever-changing city and its coast. The table on which she served coffee was covered with a red and black cloth she had hand-stitched in the pattern of a chess board.

Maha refused to be a war artist. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, she saw the white phosphorus used in the bombing of nearby Atatra: a “ball of fire, like an octopus”. But though this powerful image testified to her painter’s eye, she did not commit it to canvas. “I couldn’t draw anything,” she explained. “I was living in a depression during and after the war.” When she finally picked up a brush again, two months after that war, her first painting was of recovery, the repair of one of her characteristic fishing boats on the Gaza City beach.

Seven years later the couple had started to enjoy success, even though, thanks to the economy, the local art market was next to zero and decent paints were still hard to come by. Both had exhibited abroad; and they had moved to an elegant first-floor apartment with a small conservatory which was a riot of flowers, house plants, fruit, cacti: material for 100 still lifes. There had been another war, during which Maha had once again felt unable to pick up a brush. She continued to paint Gaza landscapes and meticulously executed abstracts built around complex symmetrical patterns, which characterise some Islamic art. Ayman’s works were of people, although as Maha was quick to point out, laughing: “Ayman doesn’t just paint people, he paints women.” His subjects are often voluptuous but all in a highly distinctive style, usually clothed but some nude, which he can hardly exhibit without a backlash from Gaza’s social conservatives. When he showed one of his female portraits in 2002, it was vandalised by an irate religious sheikh.

Cinema is also finally on the rise in Gaza. The first two Gaza film festivals needed careful negotiations with the reluctant Hamas authorities. The screening’s organiser was obliged to sign a ministry of interior document prohibiting the “intermingling” of women and men in the audience. In the 2016 premiere of a film that could hardly have been closer to its audience’s hearts, this was rigorously enacted by keeping the lights on in the auditorium. The Idol, the story of Mohammed Assaf’s success in Arab Idol, the Middle East’s equivalent of Pop Idol, had drawn a capacity crowd in 2013 to the Shawa Centre’s auditorium. Assaf, a young man from Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, with charm, an impressive voice, a wonderfully Gazan backstory and massive determination, had been propelled to international fame by his win. A packed house clapped and cheered the key moments in Hany Abu-Assad’s glossy feelgood biopic: the Hamas emigration officer at the Rafah crossing who, when Assaf arrives with fake papers, lets him through to Egypt after hearing him sing; Assaf scaling a high wall to get into the hotel where first-round auditions were being held when he arrived without the right ID; a fellow Gazan competitor, who recognises Assaf’s star potential, giving up his place in the queue.

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Before the gala showing, a 16-year-old pianist from the Edward Said Conservatory, played for the audience. The story of Sara Akel, one of the Strip’s greatest cultural assets, is typical of Gaza – exceptional talent overcoming obstacles that few of her peer group elsewhere could imagine. She had to wait seven years for a second-hand piano at home because of the shortage of the instruments in Gaza during the blockade. She first played on a toy keyboard, then mostly practised on a Yamaha “virtual piano”. Before taking part in her first national Palestinian competition, she had to learn to use pedals at the conservatory. Moreover, she could only participate by video because she and her fellow competitors from Gaza had not been allowed out to the West Bank – an all too familiar enforcement of Israel’s determined separation of Gaza from the West Bank. The year before, Sara had obtained a permit to leave through Israel for an “awesome” two-week ensemble training course in the UK, which included a masterclass at the Royal Academy of Music. That was difficult enough, but, as it turned out, easier than getting out of Gaza to play in the West Bank. “We didn’t get permits. And this thing just keeps on happening,” she told me.

The reason that the enterprising Nuseirat high school students had chosen Lear for their commemorative video last year was that it was a set text for the all-important Palestinian tawjihi or matriculation exam. A week or so before the screening, I sat in on Leyla Abdul Rahim’s English class at the Bashir Al Rayyes high school for girls in Gaza City. The 30 students were enjoying themselves. Hands shot up and there were repeated cries of “Miss, Miss” whenever Mrs Abdul Rahim tested her 17- and 18-year-old charges. “Goneril is now in love with Edmund. He’s evil. He’s like her exactly. Do you think Goneril respects her husband?” (Chorus of “no”.) When she ended the lesson, the girls spontaneously burst into applause. After the class, Khulud al-Masharawi said in English that she liked the play because “Lear began to feel sorry for people other than himself. He thought about people who had no home, or are on their own.”

I had been taken to Mrs Abdul Rahim’s class by one of her English-teaching colleagues, Jehan al-Okka. Last year, Mrs al-Okka was thrilled to be awarded a place on a US government-backed international six-week excellence and achievement programme for teachers at Bowling Green University, Ohio followed by a trip to Washington DC. Among the programme’s aims was the building of “lasting relationships that promote mutual understanding and collaboration between the United States and international teachers and students”. But in a crushing disappointment all too familiar to Palestinians imprisoned in Gaza, Mrs al-Okka was refused by both Israel and Jordan the permits necessary for her to be able to leave.

Staying true to its heritage as a four millennia-old civilisation in the face of wars and blockade is a task Gaza has to fulfil without external help. The honouring of Shakespeare in his quatercentenary was without any encouragement from the anglophone world. Before the high school students’ video performance at Nuseirat began, I asked the education ministry’s local head of English whether the British Council had been involved in the event, as it would have been elsewhere. No, he said sadly. The ministry’s contact with the British Council had stopped in 2006, when Hamas was elected. The 11-year international political and economic boycott – one that has inflicted protracted suffering on Gaza’s two million inhabitants without dislodging their rulers, and is increasingly recognised by western diplomats as a failure – is a cultural boycott, too.

Donald Macintyre’s Gaza: Preparing for Dawn is published by Oneworld on 26 October, £20. To order a copy for £17, go to guardianbookshop.com